Pumpkins - can you eat young ones?

 Just read the BBC guide to growing pumpkins and they say to just keep a
couple per plant and grow them on until the outside is hard; pick before the
first frost.

Now this does sound very much like growing marrows.

However with marrows you can cut them young and eat the whole thing - just
like eating courgettes.

So can you do the same with pumpkins or are they inedible until they are
fully grown and bright orange?

Cheers

Dave R

--
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
[Not even bunny]

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

 On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:59:14 +0100, "David WE Roberts"


That's because that's what courgettes are. I remember the
ever-patriotic C.E.Lucas Phillips writing, in _The Small Garden_, you
can buy special seed for courgettes, but the ones from English marrows
"are tastier." For a few years I used Green Bush Improved for
courgettes.

They're still inedible even then. You put them on the roof to dry out
a bit. And they're still inedible. Not to mention dashed dangerous, as
you have to get into them with an axe, which few people these days
know how to use. In Aus, they used to panic around trying to find ways
of forcing pumpkins down us: the most bearable was pumpkin scones,
with lots of butter. Butternut are good, but I'd never even heard of
those till about 1973.

--
Mike.

 On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 21:09:04 +0100, Mike Lyle



Garden_, you

tastier."

Great little book, that. My first gardening book. Still on my shelf,
if a little worn and dog-eared now. Had to reinforce the spine and
re-glue the cover a few years ago, but still used occasionally. S/H
copies widely available. (He also wrote 'Cockleshell Heroes' BTW, the
story of the commando raid on shipping in Bordeaux using canvas canoes
in 1942).

--
 
Chris

Gardening in West Cornwall overlooking the sea.
Mild, but very exposed to salt gales

 

Garden_, you

tastier."

I learned more from it than any other source. I wonder if I've still
got the shreds of my copy...

We had that as "dorm book" at school. (I remember when the spare
canoes were sold in the _Exchange and Mart_ along with those folding
bikes on which the Paras had been intended to terrify the Hun.) On
reflection, it's rather disturbing that violence was the major subject
of our literacy in those days: English history, French Revolution, US
Civil War, Caesar's campaigns, the Greek-Persian Wars, etc during the
day, then Dam Busters, Popski, and the rest to soothe us to our
innocent rest. No wonder they gave us chapel twice a day: without
these brief inputs from the Prince of Peace, even more of us would
have ended up as psychopaths.

--
Mike.

 

<snip>

So has nobody ever tried to eat a pumpkin when it was yellow and about the
size of a tennis ball?
Given that our one plant seems to be producing plenty of fruit and according
to the script you are supposed to discard all but two I may experiment
unless I find any reference to them being actively harmful.

I understand what you say about edibility - IIRC the US famed pumpkin pie
just uses the liquidised flesh as a base for much more interesting flavours.
It might make a good base for soups etc. though.

Cheers

Dave R
--
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
[Not even bunny]

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")